Brachetto d’Acqui Docg

Brachetto d’Acqui Docg

There are 26 municipalities in the Alto Monferrato that belong to the Brachetto area, stretching from Acqui Terme and Nizza Monferrato in southeastern Piedmont. Here in the foothills of the mountains, the 3,200 acres of vines grow on well-suited soils, and the climate of cold winters, hot summers, and generally mild springs and autumns, with a considerable difference in temperature between day and night, ensures that the grapes achieve the right sugar content and develop the aromatic compounds that give Brachetto its delicate and intense fragrances.

Technical

Grape varieties:

Minimum 97% Brachetto, up to 3% other Piedmont grapes.

Delimited zone:

26 designated communes in the provinces of Alessandria and Asti.

Type:

Cork, champagne, raisin.

Aging requirements:

none.

Actual alcohol level of wine:

5.0% minimum (6.0% for Spumante, 11% for Passito)

Grapes

According to legend, in Roman times a wine known as “vinum acquense” was thought to have astonishing aphrodisiac powers. First Julius Caesar and then Mark Antony are said to have sent many wineskins of vinum acquense to Egypt to the court of the famously beautiful Cleopatra before their arrival. A long chain of connections across history, land, and wine characteristics seems to link this vinum acquense to today’s Brachetto, which was already present in Acqui Terme and its surroundings in those times.Despite this promising early start, the production of Brachetto declined and nearly disappeared after phylloxera devastated the vineyards. Then in the 1950s, Arturo Bersano, a tradition-loving, farsighted producer, developed a pressure-tank method of making sparkling Brachetto. Since then, Brachetto has found a new life as a crowd-pleasing dessert wine. Using red grapes and allowing a few days of contact with the skins gives the wine its beautiful color, and stopping the fermentation before its completion provides the sweetness and effervescence.Brachetto d’Acqui docg stands for its sensory properties, which make it unique: the bunch is heavy, with plump grapes of a dark red colour and a high sugar content and powerful aromatic components thanks to the terpenes they contain: Geraniol, Nerol, Citronellol.